Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-01-22/u-s-economy-big-cities-no-longer-deliver-for-low-skill-workers <comment><USER3> " _middle-class life to those without a college degree_ "

Anytime you start delving into what has changed for a subset of people, over decades, the most important piece of the puzzle is decided ding who qualifies for the subset.

I mean concepts like "middle class" or "without a college degree."

A lot more people get degrees, in 2018. Does the graduates/nongraduates segment still represent a comparable group of people?

Human capital theory that recommended this explosion in tertiary education assumes/d it does. College makes you more productive. Make everyone go, get productive and earn more.

It turned out, college was partly a proxy for class. What college grad earnings in the 60s was actually saying is that upper-middle class kids grow into upper-middle class adults.

...at least partially.

I certainly agree that a lot of cities are too expensive for the average person. But, I don't think that you can take education in 1960 and 2018 and treat the populations as similar.

I'm also dubious about college as a proxy for skill, in the skilled labour sense. A lot of college is very general education, with even less focus on marketable skills than high school.

<comment><USER4> You make very good points above.

I really enjoyed college, especially my liberal arts classes.

That being said, with AWS Certs going for between $75-$300 how long do colleges think they can survive?

If you were a 22 yr old who studied from zero-level computing knowledge for 12 months and got the AWS Solutions Architect Pro cert (somewhat possible assuming 2 hours / day) I can already guarantee you'd receive a written offer for 100k plus within days from my current company (in Texas so that's quite a bit of money).

Again don't think colleges are going to compete well against that.

Last thing, here in Texas high schools can now issue Associate Degrees usually. Also the whole model of high school has shifted from test-focused to job-placement focus. Starting this year you can get an Associates in cybersecurity out of high school...

<comment><USER5> "That being said, with AWS Certs going for between $75-$300 how long do colleges think they can survive?"

Colleges shouldn't be in the business of training people for jobs - that is what tech schools are for. If you just want to get a job, go to a tech school, don't go to college. College is (or should be) about expanding your mind, your horizons. It should be about exposing you to new ideas and thoughts you hadn't been exposed to before. There is a reason why University and Universe have the same root.

<comment><USER6> Letter from John Adams to Abigail Adams, 1780-05-12:

> I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study > Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and > Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, > Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study > Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.

<comment><USER7> What proportion of Americans now have the ability to study topics of less directly monetary connections as compared to those of Adams' day?

I imagine the answer to that question would be interesting and nuanced.

<comment><USER8> There were only a ~dozen colleges at the time, and women couldn't attend. 90% of colonists were farmers. I don't see where there can be much nuance. American's today have vastly more ability to study a bunch of nonsense.

<comment><USER7> So narrow the lens a bit - compare only those with the ability to attend university.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The top 1% of American's own more wealth than the bottom 90% and this concentration is only increasing. Soon no cities regardless of size will deliver for low skilled workers as there will simply not be enough of the proverbial pie to go around. As wealth is concentrated and rents and property values rise the vast majority of this country will (does?) live paycheck to paycheck. This is unsustainable and will either need to be addressed or we will be living in a very real dystopia.

Add the very real prospect of social security collapsing and we have a good setup for the streets being filled with homeless and vast portions of the population failing simply because there was just not enough money to go around.

<comment><USER10> "not enough money to go around"

Where do people get this strange idea that if someone else makes money it somehow precludes others from doing it? Bill Gates got rich with an invention that also generated probably a trillion dollars in economic growth for everyone. Including most people on this sites income.

<comment><USER11> > if someone else makes money it somehow precludes others from doing it?

There is an easy way to see that and it is if the median inflation-adjusted hourly wage has risen in the US since the early 1970s. Or if inflation- adjusted weekly earnings have risen. They have not, with GDP growth, both have _fallen_.

That this even has to be discussed shows the deep control those heirs who expropriate surplus labor time from workers have over discourse, the media, forums like this (run and controlled by an accelerator) etc.

Workers create wealth at a mature company. Some of that pays the electricity bills etc., but then the rest goes to either dividends to the heirs, or to wages. That is the "preclusion". The heirs expropriate the profits of the surplus labor time from the workers creating the wealth. They are shorted on their wages. Sometimes this is explicit like the cabal between Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt that came out in the lawsuit.

Insofar as Bill Gates and invention - it takes a hell of a lot of gullibility to swallow the fantasy you concocted. Kemeny and Kurtz created BASIC. Gates hacks into a military research computer at Harvard and steals computer time from it according to Paul Allen's book (and Harvard admin found out and had proceedings) - they port BASIC to the Altair.

Then IBM comes to Microsoft. IBM got wealthy with computers on taxpayer funded government contracts and a monopoly which was lightly overseen. Gates's mother is on the United Way board with IBM CEO Opel who helps makes this meeting happen. Microsoft sells Seattle Computer Product's Qdos to IBM (Gary Kildall said it was a complete ripoff of his Drdos). A purchased ripoff of another product, sold thanks to family connections. So much for "invention".

At times like the current one, with real wages falling since the early 1970s despite economic growth, that this is even discussed is a sign of how the heirs have bought and paid for the narrative as well.

<comment><USER12> If someone invents a tool and sells it for a profit - who was exploited? Is it not possible for everyone to be richer than they started and also create wealth??

The question was really simple. Your answer is the kind that inevitably ends with "you just have to read Das Kapital". That is _not_ an answer.

<comment><USER11> > If someone invents a tool and sells it for a profit - who was exploited? Is > it not possible for everyone to be richer than they started and also create > wealth??

As I said, when, after the electricity bill etc. is paid, created wealth is split between dividends to heirs and wages to those who worked and created the wealth.

If in your hypothetical situation there is no split - if the person who worked and created wealth keeps everything - there is no expropriation.

The expropriation is the last few hours of work he does, of the wealth he creates - none of it going to him, the one who created the wealth and did the work. All of the profit going to the heir. But if there is no split, this expropriation does not happen.

<comment><USER13> I never understood why people are so casual about inequality. To put it bluntly a lot of people will eventually, if not already, be working something like three quarters of their lives for society, a company and a land owner. And only one quarter for themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I find the tone of articles like these to be patronizing.

Let's be clear, the hollowing out of rural economies is a direct and explicit effect of trade policy, and not some accident of economics and markets.

The precise dynamic in this article is that where previously cities provided capital and farms provided food, with a spectrum of services in between - <USER2> globalization, cities no longer depend on their regional rural partners, and can meet demand for food and goods using cheap international suppliers, financial flows of hot money, and massive debt funded deficits.

Unskilled labour and manufacturing don't have a problem when countries enact policies with a national interest because tariffs and anti-dumping rules create a price preference for nationally produced goods and services.

It has almost nothing to do with the skills or qualifications of rural workers. This is policy. The Bloomberg author's false lament for these "left behind" workers is nothing but sanctimonious cant.

edit: tl;dr: what's more likely to prevail, a system of globalization or the interests of rural people? I know where I will place my bet.

<comment><USER15> Trade policy? Lets start with some basics here: farms are getting larger, and there is no longer available farm land that wasn't already converted to farm land. That happened a long time ago, before me anyway. Farmer Jo has 4 kids and one farm. That farm only produced enough income for one family to live on, if they are lucky and expanded, maybe two. So Farmer Jo + One kid and family. All the other kids have to go elsewhere. You go look in town (maybe 5000 people in a good healthy farm town), and the jobs there are bleak as well. Cook, mechanic, hardware store, etc. Or you enter the trades: plumber electrician. But in small towns, there is still only so much room for them. These small towns have a form of "max capacity". So most of the kids move way. Out of four, on average 2 kids will stick around, but not enough for the town to "grow". Keep in mind, not every farm kids wants, or is cut out to perform farm labor.

Again, why do the kids leave? The town economy is based on farm economics, and is limited by the availability of land. Once the land is taken, the town will stop growing. And farm income is not what you call "stable" either, so the town goes thru a lot of boom and bust cycles. Infrastructure levies take a hit if you are talking about multiple years of taxes, simply because the farmers don't know what next year's income will look like.

Do you need to flee to the city? Depends on what you call a city. There is probably a neighbor town with +20,000 people in it. We call them cities around here (examples: Twin Falls Idaho and Algona Iowa.) In those vast metropolises you can work produce factories, car dealerships (the small towns don't have them), and other areas.

Source: I'm a farm kid with an older brother, from a small farming town in southern Idaho, and most my friends are former farm kids as well. My dad gave me the "talk" in high school, he knew I wouldn't make a good farmer. And those who stuck around are often not the lucky ones. They are just trying to hold on. (was not a fun heart-to-heart with my brother last night who thinking hard about selling out and becoming an EMT after 30 years of farm life).

<comment><USER16> I don't think GP's distinction between cities providing capital and rural areas providing food is really the line drawn by the article, or typically when comparing regional inequality. For example, the article notes that CoL adjusted average income is greater in Beaumont, TX and Birmingham, AL than NYC and SF.

Automation probably is what has caused farm unemployment, but trade policy can absolutely be blamed more for manufacturing unemployment in areas that aren't "big cities". The Syracuse or the Altoona metro areas aren't exactly farmland, but they definitely aren't NYC or SF, either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This article reads like it was written in 1990. Two points: 1) their own graph shows manufacturing employment started going back up in about 2011, and has continued to do so, which seems like an odd thing not to comment about given that it is counter to the entire thesis of their article 2) it has been pretty well demonstrated in the last couple years that college degrees became required for a job in recent years because employers had the option of requiring it, not because it was actually necessary, and as the labor market has tightened the requirements have been relaxed. The supposed "skills gap" was at least partly (perhaps largely) about HR departments using college degree as a proxy for class, and also just a way to cut down the huge stack of resumes to a manageable number.

I think Blooomberg's audience is nervous that the recent resurgence in manufacturing, and the recent increase in the percentage of the population working, are undercutting their narrative of "it's automation, there's nothing we can do".

</comment><comment><USER18> My tinfoil hat theory is that this is being caused by the increasing concentration of wealth. Which is being enabled by increasing levels of automation and efficiency.

<comment><USER19> US worker productivity growth has been extremely limited over the last 15 years. Simply put the economy isn't that efficient relative to population growth.

What has happened is massive growth in drug prices, housing, and other non- productive areas of the economy. Rent seeking is rampant.

<comment><USER20> Agreed, and the increased prices are for existing drugs. We are not seeing an increase in cost due to innovation. Price increases are caused by companies charging more year after year for the same pill.

<comment><USER21> These companies are granted monopoly status on a compact with the Citizens and US government.

If they break this compact, I see no reason to protect their patent. Eminent domain is a thing. Lets use it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The bar for "low-skilled" is rising not only due to globalization but automation. In a way, this seems correct -- in a growing economy you shouldn't really be able to carve out a middle class lifestyle pushing a lever for 50+ years.

If the economy is growing and innovation is taking it's course the low hanging fruit will eventually be clipped, the "gig" economy actually has the trend right in terms of the next "middle class" job for "low skilled" workers being involved with augmenting data driven services and services in general.

The place where the gig economy falls short is of course regarding stability and benefits, I don't know if it's the governments place to step in here or a new model is required from these human augmented data services, but we're only at the beginning of the economy being fundamentally transformed by data.. and there are still many areas where automation and AI is not good enough.. perhaps this is where the low skilled middle class earns its next income.

<comment><USER23> All this happened before. 1920's people were competing for fewer and fewer temp jobs. We call them gigs, but this is just part of the crash. Hopefully it won't be as bad and we won't need a world war to come out of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> New business idea for transportation: HeliHelp.

HeliHelp flies in low skilled workers via helicopter, quicker than commutes and allows you to keep paying "market wages" that don't allow employees for retail/restaurants/etc to live anywhere near the place of upscale upperclass community where you need your employees to be during work. Fly them in, then fly them out, way out. HeliHelp is not only an expense, but it can be part of your employees "real compensation" to further not give any sort of wage increase.

"HeliHelp: Better to buy a helicopter than to pay above market wages" /s

 _On a serious note_ :

Workers share of GDP has been in constant decline since the 70s [1].

Velocity of money is at all time lows and off a cliff [2].

Household income has been normalized, sideways [3]. Middle class is not getting richer but flat.

Those are signs that wages are not growing as fast as they could or should. A better economy comes when more people have consumer spending supply and that increases demand across the board. Demand brings investment.

Wage increases have essentially been efficiently worked out of the system, and at a certain point that is a more stagnant economy than we could have which affects lower, middle and upper classes.

Wealth does not spend enough to fuel an economy, you need the middle and lower to be consumers that have demand, with money in their pockets before the rich will invest.

Middle class is still getting pummeled and nothing has changed.

[1] [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W270RE1A156NBEA](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W270RE1A156NBEA)

[2] [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2V](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2V)

[3] [https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2016/12/the-puzzle-of- real-m...](https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2016/12/the-puzzle-of-real-median- household-income)

<comment><USER25> Should middle class wages keep increasing relative to everyone else forever? That's clearly an absurd scenario. Middle class wages increased substantially comprared to upper class in the 50s and 60s. "Stagnating" could also be seen as "holding on to gains".

<comment><USER24> > Should middle class wages keep increasing relative to everyone else forever?

Yes if you want to keep a middle class.

In a consumer economy that requires growth, demand has to be there for investment. One way to achieve demand is people have more money to buy things in a consumer economy and their earning outstepping household inflation which is higher than macro inflation. Ultimately the middle class has been on a downward trend if flat due to higher household inflation.

Inflation is a macro level number. Household/family inflation is more than the macro inflation number on the whole economy i.e. housing/rent, food, gas, tuition/education, healthcare, etc are all higher inflationary items than other indicators which pull it down across the economy but not for many groups [1], especially middle class that gets the weight on their backs on healthcare, tuition and more due to no subsidies or higher pricing because they make more.

Just because inflation on the macro economy didn't go up too much, doesn't mean family/household/individual inflation isn't higher and too much at the same time of wage stagnation [2][3]. Flat since 2000...

Middle class is shrinking because wages are not outstepping inflation relative to their needs. That isn't relative to everyone but an overall downward trend for middle class. While lower and upper classes are up they will also stagnate if that trend continues.

Middle class wages and breaks need more help than ever right now due to inequality and very little policy or the market helping middle class handle the weight that the lower and upper class put on their backs. Middle class consumers support local economies and return most of their money back to the market/economy, wealth does not. Middle class is also mostly the longs of the public stock markets in terms of investments and retirement accounts. The trend of a middle class disappearing cannot continue or the system breaks and the public markets will also probably break, that affects everyone including the wealthy.

More people can buy your product and invest in your company if they have cash money to do so.

[1] [https://ritholtz.com/2016/08/inflation-look-right- places/](https://ritholtz.com/2016/08/inflation-look-right-places/)

[2] [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?graph_id=195323#](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?graph_id=195323#)

[3] [https://seekingalpha.com/article/4111556-august-2017-median-...](https://seekingalpha.com/article/4111556-august-2017-median- household-income)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> In fact traditional industries had many workers that were "high skilled" craftsmen. They might not had a degree but were "high skilled". It is these craftsmen that were systematically replaced in the market by the low skilled labor, often immigrant labor.

</comment><comment><USER27> >an economist at the job-search company Indeed, finds that when salaries are adjusted for local costs of living, the average worker actually makes less in New York City or Los Angeles than in Toledo, Ohio or Birmingham, Alabama:

Particularly impressive considering that the "average" for NYC, LA, SF includes a lot more very high salaries than Toledo and Birmingham (Google, FB, etc are not hiring hordes of SREs making six figures in the latter).

<comment><USER28> I was just doing this calculation the other day, for a bit of background I am in an area of the Midwest, close to Toldeo and am graduating in May.

I interned in NYC last summer and sublet there. So I was trying to decide whether to move out that way or stay in a smaller Midwest city to start my career in.

When you factor in cost of living, rental costs, junior level developer salaries, taxes, and transportation costs. I found that I would need to make around 20k more than the average junior level developer salaries for NYC (according to the estimates I've been seeing listed on Glassdoor) to get as much take home pay after expenses as I will make staying in the Midwest for less pay.

I assume (and plan on calculating this) that you could easily generalize this to most cities in the Midwest with a minimum of 500k people.

<comment><USER27> I went from living in the city and commuting via rail, walking to the grocery store, etc, etc to owning a house an hour out of the city, commuting via car, etc, etc.

The mortgage payment is about the same as my rent. Even after all the additional costs of home ownership I am able to save more money. Then there's the quality of life improvements. I have 1500sf instead of <500\. I don't have to plan my grocery shopping around the weather. My girlfriend can have a pet (and I can have a happier girlfriend). Etc. etc.

<comment><USER29> Yup, it's all about the trade off. Space, cheap rent, 2 hr commutes vs high rent, 20 min commutes, walkability. I'd imagine it changes over time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I wonder how much of this (or anything related to inequality getting worse) is also a proxy of the "new permutations" of families that were "created" over the last couple of decades (sorry for the poor terminology. I'm not sure how best to describe the concept).

If for a while the norm was a single low skill working parent with someone staying at home to take care of a large families, then that's what you'll need to live in a high demand area. If you have zero working parent, or a larger family, then you're a few steps away from that.

However if we introduce a few more possible optimizations: \- 2 working parents. \- No family (as in, no kids) \- College education.

And so on, and you make those things very common (common enough to affect local economies), then the people who don't have those things are even further from the norm. DINKs with significant educations are miles ahead from more "traditional" families as far as economic situation go, and they're becoming more and more common, but back then they were nearly unheard of. Fill a city with DINKs, and everyone else is screwed.

<comment><USER31> I don't think it's that simple, the work force participation rate today is about the same that it was in 1980 (abet there has been population growth since then).

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> The headline is misleading on two accounts (though the content is fine). First, it's not that big cities don't deliver, they do. It's that the marginal improvments in wages do not make up for the cost of living increase. So a better headline would be that zoning is pricing ppl out of big cities. Second, some cities are still amazing at helping kids escape from poverty, even if the parents are no better off after moving there. The article itself cites that research. That's huge. A better headline would be "Some Cities help break intergenerational poverty."

Article is fine, but the conclusions you might draw from the headline are dead wrong.

</comment><comment><USER33> I find the term "low-skill worker" insulting and ignorant. It's much more accurate to call them low-wage workers.

</comment><comment><USER34> So long as getting a decent place to live is dependent on income, it's unsurprising to me that cities - which are established because of their ability to produce outsized economic value - become the domain of people who produce outsized economic value. Yes, cities are fun as a side product, but people don't typically invest this much just for fun.

The market only cares about your quality of life if that translates to significant profit. Nobody has any claim in such a system to live near a city, with any level of comfort. So insanely long commutes and inhumane cage homes should not be a surprising result.

As the value of being in a city rises, the equilibrium will be to make life maximally miserable for those who can't afford the luxuries present in a city. And for those who can, the equilibrium is to make things minimally comfortable for those people to decide to continue generating economic value.

The market has no reason to provide affordable housing to people who cannot afford the economic value of the land beneath it, so the alternatives the article suggests - building a lot of housing (artificially distorting the market) or providing strong social services (artificially distorting the market), unsurprisingly, needs to artificially distort the market.

There are clearly things we care about that the market does not reflect. Money does not capture all the things we value in society, including economic diversity within a city, so expecting purely market-driven incentives to solve this issue is naive.

<comment><USER35> How about using zoning laws to enforce the mixture of types of home AND the amount of housing ratio to the number of jobs (commercial and industrial zoning)?

If you have more jobs than you have homes, don't zone for more jobs.

<comment><USER34> I'm all for policy like that, as well as generally reducing zoning restrictions in general as far as housing capacity goes. Japanese nuisance zoning is a pretty good system, for example.

But my main point is, it takes interventions that intentionally constrain the way the market works, to get a fair system going. To institute a sane proportion of housing to jobs nowadays that preserves a mix of affordable and luxury housing, you're going to need to do a hell of a lot of subsidizing to make that affordable housing worth it to construct in the first place. So who's up for subsidizing it?

<comment><USER35> I don't really think you have to subsidize anything. Zone for density and sq. ft ensuring there is a stable _variety_ of each, zone housing and business only so each can be equal to the other in population (basically as many people commuting out of your city as commuting in), and tax vacancy 10x occupied rates. Let the market free within those confines.

If a city does not want to add much density, I am fine with that as long as they are not allowed to keep adding jobs.

160,000 more people work in San Francisco than work there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> > So what's to be done in order to help mid-skilled and non-college workers > live decent, middle-class lives? ... build lots more housing in cities, > driving down rents and making cities more livable for everyone.

This is a nice idea in theory, but isn't this a temporary fix? For the first five years, housing prices will lower. But as more companies (demanding higher-educated individuals) realize more people are available, those companies will increase their staff or start new companies.

So five years later, we are back to where it started.

<comment><USER37> So five years later you build _more housing_.

We as a species are capable of building absurdly dense cities that are probably per-capita the cheapest place a person can live (since you cram so many into every skyscraper). We choose not to because "property values" and "my view from my window" and "I don't want _those_ people living here".

<comment><USER38> I agree that you need to keep building housing, but I also think it's important to not concede the point that it will have no effect on housing prices.

The GP is flat out wrong in their assessment that prices will just return to what they were.

Even if you build more housing, and then stop, the prices will be lower than if you hadn't built anything at all.

<comment><USER39> This is only true if an increase in the housing supply does not lead to an increase in the population. At a national level, this is probably true enough to assume. But, at the level of individual cities, it is not nessaserrily true. I can easily imagine scenarios where an increase in housing causes an increase in the local population greater than the increase in housing capacity.

<comment><USER38> For increase supply to have no effect on price, the demand curve has to be highly inelastic, but this just isn't true. People very much do make decisions about where to live based on the cost.

At the margin, people may be more likely to move if you build more housing, but this would be because they can get a better deal on housing, not because there is some abstract idea of more housing.

Without a reduction in price/increase in housing quality, there is no mechanism that would cause more people to show up.

The main exception to this is if you have rent control capping prices, but this isn't really a big part of any market where this discussion is taking place.

<comment><USER39> I am thinking more in terms of lagging responses.

For instance, suppose we increased supply 10% today, and prices immidietly fall. Seeing the lower prices, bussiness begin making plans to open in the new city to take advantage of the lower COL workforce. In total, these plans would increase the demand for labor by 20% and take 5 years to be implemented.

At some point in those 5 years, people will have moved into the new housing driving the costs back up to their original levels.

In an ideal market, bussiness would stop moving in, as their original motivation to do so is gone. However, the market is not ideal. Plans had already been written, and the moving has already begun, so the demand for labor will increase even further, encouraging more people to move in, driving up the costs of housing.

<comment><USER38> I mean, rents won't immediately fall. We're incapable of producing that much housing quickly. We're limited by all sorts of construction infrastructure. It's going to take a decade to crawl out of this hole in the best case.

This also assumes that these hypothetical employers would be paying the same amount as the employers who were there before. Which is unlikely because the existing employers were already there paying increased wages, vs the new employers who waited for falling CoL/salaries to move in.

Also, raising salaries is often not enough to offset CoL expenses, since not all employees have the same CoL expenses, e.g. families, and those with higher CoL expenses will again move away / won't come to these jobs.

Also, in practice, the amount of jobs is not the binding factor in, e.g. the bay area. There are plenty of jobs out there, people are just a lot less willing to move there due to the insane CoL/shitty commute.

You could have some perfect storm where the induced demand perfectly offsets the new housing, but if you assume there is some elasticity at all points in the system, I think the default assumption should be that increased supply will drive down prices for everyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> "The goal [of government] is to have an economy which makes it possible for normal, average young people to marry and have kids."

From: [https://bloodyshovel.wordpress.com/2019/01/21/tucker- carlson...](https://bloodyshovel.wordpress.com/2019/01/21/tucker-carlsons-war- against-woke-capital-and-the-future-of-the-right/)

<comment><USER41> That article...woof.

Also, why is that the goal of a government? Isn't that the goal of a culture? Governments are meant to define and protect the rights of their citizens. Economics are only a portion of what governments do (unless you want to consider everything economics?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Moretti's idea, which has been echoed by some urban development activist groups, is to build lots more housing in cities, driving down rents and making cities more livable for everyone. Another idea is to use research universities to revitalize flagging regions by dispersing knowledge workers to less- populated areas.- This is actual a nice idea..!!

</comment><comment><USER43> Just to point out, this article is focused on the US only.

<comment><USER44> But we do see the same problem in several European cities. For instance there's been some debate about how nurses can't really afford to live in Oslo anymore due to the discrepancy between income and rent.

<comment><USER45> I've long thought the same about London. How does a teacher, nurse, or policeman rent anywhere within a 60 minute commute?

Probably many delay having a family and are able to share a house, but eventually that's going to get old for a lot of people.

<comment><USER37> Europe as a whole has a large mitigating factor in that there is really good public infrastructure buses and trains there. Sure, an hour commute a day isn't preferable but if you can spend it reading or watching netflix it impacts your life a lot less negatively than having to drive a car the whole time.

So no, the baristas, janitors, etc of London can't live in London. But at least most of their commutes aren't as terrible as the majority of US workers driving individual cars over great distances every day to go to work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I can't help but think of Kurt Vonnegut's book "Player Piano" when reading articles of this nature.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_Piano_(novel)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_Piano_\(novel\))

</comment><comment> cbm-vic-20 Have there been studies of correlations between crime rates and the affordability of cities?

<comment><USER47> Found these briefly:

" _Recent years have witnessed widespread public concern and increased policy attention to issues of housing affordability. In 2015 a full one-half of U.S. households were paying more than 30 percent of their income in rent. We identify multiple channels by which individual or family outcomes are inferior when rents increase faster than income. Research further suggests that rising rent burdens may reduce the economic potential of metropolitan areas. This paper reviews the evidence on why affordability matters._ " [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016604621...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166046217303058)

" _We examine whether there is a significant effect of foreclosure on robbery and burglary across neighborhoods, and whether this varies systematically across cities. Specifically, we consider whether several city‐level attributes—overall foreclosure rates, levels of socioeconomic disadvantage and prior vacancy rates, the degree of recent new housing construction, housing affordability, and the quantity and quality of policing—moderate the relationship between neighborhood levels of foreclosure and crime._ " [https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1540-6237....](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1540-6237.2012.00888.x)

<comment><USER48> Can't read the first one, but the second one focuses on foreclosure rates which seems more indicative of an economic shock rather than general low affordability.

<comment><USER47> Yes; it was a sub-5-minute google scholar search to potentially get someone started on what seems to exist in the field. I'm sure if one wanted more specialized information either someone on HN will know more than me or someone else can take more time to search more effectively.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Uploaded a copy of the site to Imgur as a mirror in case you are unable to read because you've exhausted free reading credits.

[1] [https://i.imgur.com/uE1rOOs.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/uE1rOOs.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER50> They barely deliver for high skill workers.

The lifestyle I can afford, even on a lower salary, in a mid sized city is significantly better than what I could afford on a generous salary in a major city like NYC, SF, Seattle, LA, etc.

</comment><comment><USER51> With regard to the headline as someone that feels like they escaped the suburbs via competition, intellectual acumen and luck all I can say is

"GREAT!" Now gtfo and I'll just try not to think about the public housing lottery and super cheap rent there, and hope that helps with keep some low- skill services available in the city.

Those exurbs can often develop into their own hubs, not for social mobility, but to do what they need for people. "The City" shouldn't be seen as where people need to be, but it can be a luxury!

</comment><comment><USER52> Cities without a happy working class is either a resort or a plantation.

</comment><comment><USER53> As other comments have noted, this isn't just a national story. China has a large scale plan to push recent low skill migrants away from big cities toward medium sized cities (medium sized for China anyway) in an effort to help boost consumption. China also faces an enormous housing glut that is at least partially powered by middle and upper class folks using real estate as way to save and invest for retirement. Anyone under the age of 35 and/or without a family history of home ownership in a major American city can tell you that this sounds very familiar.

And though the economies in both the US and China are purportedly chugging along, wealth inequality seems to be pulling at the seams everywhere, dragging on growth and exaggerating the tensions between established urban families and those who serve them. How the differences in scale, complexity, and political culture will shape the political responses... well, I'd be inclined to put my money on Xi before the Orange one.

That said, the US will get to juice those spend-happy retiring baby boomers who will be spending their kids inheritance for the next couple of decades, and if the grad students powering the biotech, materials, and data improvements don't jump ship, there's a chance the west could actually keep pace. But the dynamics of market driven social and mass media don't inspire so much confidence of late.

The largest political challenge in both countries may be in reconciling the demands of the moralising progressive youth and the reactionary would-be capitalists, the entrenched liberal urban bureaucracies and the knee-jerk conservative know-bettering from the peanut gallery. While the Chinese impulse for social order will enjoy the advantages of increasing surveillance and sheer scale, the west will be waiting on the decaying but stubbornly persistent tradition of liberal education to surface some y'know, actual leadership.

</comment><comment><USER54> How do high skilled service jobs fit into this picture?

<comment><USER55> Probably much better, but I don't know the math myself.

The main key is having just some barrier to entry.

If you know how to repair motorcycles, you're going to be around more people that can afford motorcycles in a city. They'll be more expensive ones on average and people will be less likely to do the work themselves (time is worth more or they don't have a garage to do the work)

There's a shop in Chicago that only works on mopeds. They charge $75/hr on the workbench and that's for relatively cheap machines. Wait time without a rush fee in summer is on the order of weeks because they are the only non- independents in the game.

Due to the population, you can also run pretty niche services/shops. I know a place that only does battery sales and services. Phone, automotive, household gates, and so on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> And yet we see this huge push in the intelligentsia for how cities "increase creativity" and promote value "x y and z" and how "we should be like China and build planned mega cities".

Cities that are very walkable and have a thriving downtown / mixed business areas can be a ton of fun and very good, but it's very hard to ever make that affordable, and basically impossible to do in America which has large space demands and associates home ownership with the American Dream.

If anything, I see the intellgientsia pushing it because they have been captured by the global rich (see Steven Pinker) and the super rich love cities (again we all do) and they want more of them to play in as well as a huge domestic servant / labor force bought of with a modicum of UBI for the time being.

<comment><USER37> You make cities affordable by unrestricting building height way beyond the "projected" demand for residential construction in the core. Then as dense, cheap residential fills up you will see the natural build out of more of it. Keeping space to grow / build public transit and infrastructure is also critical. That doesn't mean overbuild now, it means don't try to stop it when the time comes.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: International Banking - <AUTHOR>

Questions for Canadians working in the United States:
1. What financial institutions do you recommend?
2. How do you reduce transfer fees?
3. What are your thoughts and experiences with international banking?
The company that pays me provides direct deposit to US banks, exclusively. Using the Bank of America was a mistake (wire transfers are nearly impossible for a Canadian citizen).
Even with PayPal horror stories in mind, I was thinking about using PayPal to aid in the transfers. Knowing other viable options would be great.
Thank you! <comment><USER2> Hi thangalin!

I live in Canada but have a business and personal US bank account in the US with Harris Bank (owned by the Bank of Montreal). You can set it all up by mail. I've never even visited the branch. [http://www4.harrisbank.com/personal/0,4458,359877_390942,00....](http://www4.harrisbank.com/personal/0,4458,359877_390942,00.html)

To transfer money between my US and Canadian accounts to use at home, I use <http://www.xe.com/fx>

It's free to setup and between Canada and the US, you transfer at no cost by choosing the EFT/ACH options.

</comment><comment><USER3> Try HSBC...</comment>


Ask HN: Anyone know how you can get a Google dev phone to make Android apps? - <AUTHOR>

Hi there, I am thinking about converting my web apps into Android apps to reach the Android market.  I do not have an Android phone.  Can someone tell me how I can possibly get a Google developer phone (other than going to Google I/O, etc)?
I realize this is somewhat of a ridiculous request but I have read blogs of people being enticed by google and offered a free phone to convert their web apps into Android apps.  So I figure there is no harm in asking.
Any insight would be helpful.  Thanks <comment><USER2> You can of course buy one. Or even just use the emulator (if your writing fairly simple applications this may be enough).</comment>


Ask YC/HN: Optimal state...  - <AUTHOR>

Where in a startup/product's life cycle does it make the most sense jump into YC?<p>Obviously there are a huge number of variables that make each case different but does anyone have recommendations or experience they would care to share? <comment><USER2> It's hard to generalize this. Probably not when you've just started and probably not six years in.

The point is largely to get a kick in the pants and a clearer sense of direction. So you probably want to be far enough along that you've thoroughly explored the issues and made initial attempts at development. You also tend to want a relatively cohesive team that's used to working together.

You can reapply, so "when you get accepted" may be the easiest answer. If nothing else, the application process may help you refine your ideas.

<comment><USER3> _If nothing else, the application process may help you refine your ideas._

I would recommend you (the OP) go ahead and start filling out the application even if you don't submit it. I did this, in part to help me clarify my own ideas and in part to help me clarify whether or not YC was right for me. It's not but filling the application out, even only partway, was a good exercise and very helpful food for thought.</comment></comment>


You Know You're In Design Hell When You See... - <AUTHOR> http://catb.org/~esr/html-hell.html

<comment><USER2> Welcome to 1996...

</comment><comment><USER3> FTA: "menus made entirely from image maps"

<comment><USER4> I liked the line below that: "lots of people use text-only browsers like lynx". Maybe for small values of "lots".</comment></comment>


Open job application to replace Nokia's CEO Steven Elop - <AUTHOR> http://www.jobrupt.com/j/chief-executive-officer-4a0b458d-5608-40a4-8f89-23009cb59dc6

<comment><AUTHOR> The applicant wants to fork android, merge with the best of Meego and create Nokia OS in 2012.</comment>


Obama: Cyber attack serious threat to economy, national security - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/obama-cyber-attack-serious-threat-to-economy-national-security-7000001324/

<comment><USER2> A sensible attempt to promote growth - the vast number of systems that will need complete replacement would dwarf green tech for a decade.

Of course you will need to force the change over and getting the DHS to regulate it is probably theworst ever idea</comment>


AngularJS Paginated Resource - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/begriffs/angular-paginated-resource

<comment><USER2> I appreciate the thought that's gone into this, but I don't know how robust this solution is, and, worse than that, it's a solution in search of a problem. It needlessly complicates things while providing no clear value.

How, for instance, do proxies interact with these headers? I think that they _should_ still properly serve from cache when possible, but I wouldn't bet the farm on it. Have you investigated this? And how's client support for this? Quick Googling reveals someone complaining about 206 responses not being cached by several clients, including Chrome and Firefox.

On top of that, putting range information in query parameters lends itself much better to HATEOAS. I get a URL with some parameters, I know that given a next relation all I need to do is navigate to that URL to get the next page of results. With yours, all I've got is you saying "these headers mean this."

Thoughts?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, it's most definitely a solution in search of a problem -- although in this case the solution is an RFC from 1999. I wish we could take HTTP at its word, but maybe that's too much to ask in this wild world of recalcitrant proxies and buggy browsers.

Like you pointed out, this header business doesn't let you do anything you theoretically couldn't do with query params, but the headers feel more in the spirit of HTTP. Like we already do this for downloading parts of big files, and why do we do things a different way for downloading parts of big lists? Parsimony and all that.

As far as violating HATEOAS, I feel like headers are a first class citizen of HTTP state. Because browsers have historically been such horrible user agents they have conditioned us to forget that headers are as much a part of requests as urls, ports, and protocols.The only janky thing is my introduction of the extension relation type "items." [http://tools.ietf.org/search/rfc5988#section-4.2](http://tools.ietf.org/search/rfc5988#section-4.2)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> A submission about pagination framed in a condescending tone? Lol.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I know, it's silly. But on HN the titles have to be over-the-top to get any votes. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > _Give me everything! Nope too much, bro._

Brace yourself for a shitstorm. There was a guy yesterday who got attacked and nearly had his project forked under a different name for naming it "bro", which is obviously offensive to women and minorities. You insensitive jackass.

<popcorn.gif/>

</comment><comment><USER5> Two things:

1\. Isn't the Content-Range header for partial files (not sets of files). Since the spec seems to define it in terms of bytes, not arbitrary items.

2\. I'd imagine you couldn't bookmark or share URL's using this method.

<comment><AUTHOR> As scarmig pointed it, the spec allows custom range units. Downloading pieces of a big file seems to be to be essentially the same problem as downloading parts of a long list of items.

Also, I'm imagining this header approach more for API calls than for bookmarkable user-facing pages. This way the data that comes back from the server can be a clean array of results without metadata. Feels like metadata is what HTTP headers are for.</comment></comment>


In Japan, Young Face Generational Roadblocks - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/28/world/asia/28generation.html

<comment><USER2> The part about Horie was kind of interesting.

He was really seen as someone to rock the boat, and as someone who could really turn around the stodgering top-down society that is Japan. It's probably safe to say that most of the youth of the country were rooting for him, and the new economic growth that he would most likely bring to Japan.

Then he f-ed up, and got caught up in stock fraud. I know that he's still appealing the decision, but the evidence against him was pretty huge, and the backlash was rather dire.

Up until that point, all the proponents of Horie were saying "Look! This young guy is brilliant, making tons of money, and can change the way Japan operates!" When he got arrested, that changed to "Look! This young guy broke the law, was making tons of money, and pretty much guaranteed that the youth of Japan will forever be trapped beneath their senile overlords." (Ok, that last part might just be me)

sorry, it seems I'm still a little peeved about the whole thing.

Yesterday I was talking with the (rather young) CEO of a automotive- electronics startup and he was saying that Japan's industry is slowly dying because of a lack of desire to innovate. He said "In order to succeed in the Japanese market, you can't introduce something new because it'll get shot down. You need to go abroad, do your research, make demos, make it work, then bring it back to Japan and say 'Look what we're doing abroad!' ".

I hope this country does great things (because I don't have anywhere else to go), but I really worry about the future of a country that doesn't value its youth to such a degree that they lose all motivation.

<comment><USER3> This reflects my experience in Japan; overall, people here are _terrified_ of change. Even within most companies, the tiniest of changes need to be communicated and agreed upon by every separate group, before anything can actually happen.

<comment><USER4> While this is true, I think Japanese culture mostly just makes this more obvious. A big part of it is based on perception (in western culture, change is much more accepted generally, and people tend to show/believe they change much more than they actually do).

For example, what happened during the Meiji area is pretty unique in world history AFAIK, and that was a gigantic change. My experience in Japan is that people are less willing to change things, but are much more willing to change once they agreed on the nature of the change (that's part of what makes Japanese company still efficient today: people are willing to sacrifice a lot for something else than their own self if they believe it worths it).

There is no question that Japan is facing huge challenges as of today - but I would not bet on Japanese society not being able to deal with it once they really have no choice. Also, the young people the article refers too are actually between 25 up to 40 years old (people entering the job market after the bubble in mid 90ies), so mathematically, old people who benefitted from the pre-bubble system will be less and less influential

<comment><USER5> What's the old corporate training line American's get before doing business in Japan? Something like "In Japan it can take forever to come to a decision, but once made, it's executed at a frightening pace."

<comment><USER3> Oh no it's not. The Japanese are, and I'm generalizing quite heavily here, not good at getting going, or at going quickly once they get moving.

What they are really, shockingly, amazingly good at, is doing things well once they do get moving.

Over here, quality matters more than anything else, and it shows everywhere -- even the 'dollar-store' (100 yen shop goods) have shockingly good quality.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is largely directionally accurate. (Especially for young ladies -- curious that the NYT missed that angle, one would have assumed they would be all over it.)

On the plus side, persistent market inefficiencies are a gift from God if you're prepared to exploit them. (Where else can you find Californian purchasing power at engineering wages which would be skimpy in small town Iowa?)

<comment><USER7> Can you clarify that last sentence a bit? (I think you mean, things are enough cheaper in Japan that a skimpy salary still has great purchasing-power- parity... but I thought as a highly-urbanized country, Japan had relatively high prices for everything from real estate to food. I could easily be mistaken, and would love to hear examples of what _is_ cheaper there, and where.)

<comment><USER6> Japan is a rich nation, by any measure you want. Japanese twenty-something engineers are not rich people. You can take their labor and use it to sell to _other_ Japanese people, like their parents or the beneficiaries of Californian-public-employee-esque sweet retirement deals.

(See also: Demand Media, which does the same equation except it substitutes "stay-at-home moms" for 20-something Japanese engineers.)

Most persistent market mispricings of labor should be profitably exploitable.

<comment><USER8> how long more do you think it will take for young japanese to realize they're "profitably exploitable"?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I feel the US is in roughly the same boat.We have more freedoms, but our whole system puts pressure on promoting higher education, while simultaneously providing no promise that there will be a way to recoup the debt load. Our mentalities, of protecting a gentrifying population, are stifling future generations access to the same privilege that prior generations had.

My personal view on the situation, is that we need to step back and look at what this system of higher education has done. And then start focusing on vocational training, in HS, apprenticeships, and on the job skill training.

<comment><USER10> >We have more freedoms

Such as?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It seems that we might look back in history and see the rise and fall of Japan in a single generation. Culturally, founder CEOs are given the utmost respect, while hired CEOs are looked at almost as figureheads. By the time Japan really started to decline in the 90s, most of the entrepreneurs who rebuilt industry after the war were gone- leaving their companies rudderless. The political sphere is even worse, corruption and cronyism abound. Japan, the unstoppable juggernaut, is now ruled by old men lining their pockets.

Surely there are lessons to be learned here.

<comment><USER12> It's probably more extreme in Japan, but you could say a similar thing is happening all over the western world right now, a decade later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Deru kugi wa utareru

Cross-reference with "An Innovator Leaving Japan"

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1325704>

<http://synaptify.com/?p=613728>

OT: Ikiru "To Life" (a 1952 film about one man and Japan's human crushing bureaucracy) is one of Kurosawa's best

<http://www.acepilots.com/discussions/ikiru.html>

<comment><USER14> Just as a little tidbit, the phrase "deru kui wa utareru" (kui = kugi), 「出る杭は打たれる」 means "The nail that sticks out gets hammered down".

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think I understand now why the "otaku" cultural industry is so vibrant. A bright, working-class high schooler knows he can't become a president at Sony or Misubishi, but if he's good enough, he can write the next YuYu Hakusho or Naruto. He can start by publishing an indie doujinshi with a group of friends. That's how some of the best-paid manga writers in Japan began.

</comment><comment><USER16> Direct link to bypass log in page: [http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/28/world/asia/28generation.ht...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/28/world/asia/28generation.html?partner=rss&emc=rss)

</comment><comment><USER17> _A nation that produced Sony, Toyota and Honda has failed in recent decades to nurture young entrepreneurs_

Why did those companies succeed?

<comment><USER18> Because they had a very much blank slate after the war, when the old order was not only toppled, but ashamed and humiliated, and the old good-old-boys networks were destroyed or at least weakened.

Furthermore, the nation was hungry, not literally, but hungry for success, so they worked extra hard. The success of post-war Japan is built on the 16-hour workdays of countless salarymen. Those peculiar post-war conditions are long gone.

<comment><USER19> Oh, yes, literally too. There were more people in Japan (return of imperial forces and families) and less food. Millions were hungry, and some starved to death.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This looks like an amazing opportunity to start a company and hire talented young people.

<comment><USER2> See the comment above by rshigeta and my reply as to why that will be a lot harder than you think.

I wish it wasn't, but a society based entirely on social connections that is resistant to change is a hard place for an outsider to start a company.

<comment><USER21> Would there be an opportunity to hire undervalued local talent if you were export focused, and didn't care about the local market?</comment></comment></comment>


Dear Unit Economics, I HATE You - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@guyshachar28/dear-unit-economics-i-hate-you-7c28b9aef08d#.c0j9zwcmf <comment><USER2> Solid points! Couldn't agree more. Well written, good job!

</comment><comment><USER3> enjoyed reading it.. as a young entrepreneur myself i can relate to what you discussed! waiting for your next piece

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I'm glad you liked it!</comment></comment>


MacBook Battery Replacement Requires Admin Credentials? - <AUTHOR> http://ethancbanks.com/2016/09/06/macbook-battery-replacement-requires-admin-credentials/ <comment><USER2> Maybe the standard repair procedure requires them to run some low level diagnostics to confirm the HW is OK?

If you are concerned about your data then I guess the answer is to wipe the machine before giving it to them and restore from a backup afterwards.</comment>


Time for Apple to open up the iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://www.macworld.com/article/151695/2010/06/iphone_open.html

<comment><USER2> It's also time for Microsoft to open source NT and XP, but that's about equally likely to happen as this proposal. Not that I disagree; it's just a pipe dream. What I find shocking is that this is in Macworld. Macworld!

<comment><USER3> The article was about allowing people to install any app they want, even if it isn't in the App Store. He wasn't talking about open-sourcing the OS. I agree with him.

<comment><USER2> I also agree 100% with him, I just meant that Apple will never allow that to happen. Just like I think Microsoft SHOULD open source NT and XP, and that will never happen either.</comment></comment></comment>


Spy Agencies Urge Caution on Phone Deal - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/29/us/spy-agencies-urge-caution-on-phone-deal.html

<comment><USER2> Chertoff charged a "modest sum" for the report eh ?

</comment><comment><USER3> Title is misleading. The title on HK ("NSA concerned to lose US phone system traffic controller"), the story doesn't refer to the NSA at all (it literally doesn't contain the term "NSA" and refers to the "National Security Agency" just once in reference to Snowden's former employer).

Instead it refers to a paid for report by the competition and the FBI (and unnamed "other" law enforcement) who cite broad "foreigners bad, Americans good" concerns and other vague threats (something something disruption).

The article reads like a Neustar Press Release. I am well aware that the author is well regarded, but still, very Neustar friendly article...</comment>


Instruments of Destruction: Project Management on the Death Star - <AUTHOR> https://archiveofourown.org/works/17356235 <comment><USER2> [https://archiveofourown.org/works/3673335](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3673335) is the inevitable companion.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hilarious! Wish it had gone on another 10 pages.</comment>


The Solvay Conference - <AUTHOR> http://iconicphotos.wordpress.com/2010/01/28/the-solvay-conference/

<comment><USER2> I have this photo above my desk to insire me and shame me into working when I might otherwise be staring off into space. It's a photocopy from a photo that was in my local physics department, and my copy pre-dates the internet.

It still inspires me to work, but also reminds me to have a life. After all, this life is not a dress rehearsal.</comment>


What do you think of my site - <AUTHOR>

Visit and let me know what you think it needs. www.studyhallnotes.com <comment><USER2> You submitted this site, what, a week ago? Two? Give it some time, remodel it a lot, and once you have a significantly newer version show it off again.

The feedback I gave you last time still stands: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=442736>

</comment><comment><USER3> Content looks good, although I'm not a member of the target demographic so it is not personally compelling.

Design-wise a few minor tweaks would make large strides.

I'd axe the black bars at top and bottom, make the logotype strong and unique, and strengthen your headings. Also truncate long entries. And some bad mojo is goin' on with the footer.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm not your demographic either, but seeing as it's a student site, did you consider facebook connect instead of registration?

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually planned on doing that today

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think people can get motivated for less than $5000. Maybe you should increase the prize pool.</comment>


Subreedit For : BitMessage Channels and Contacts - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/BMChan/

<comment><USER2> "Bitmessage is a P2P communications protocol used to send encrypted messages to another person or to many subscribers. It is decentralized and trustless, meaning that you need-not inherently trust any entities like root certificate authorities. It uses strong authentication which means that the sender of a message cannot be spoofed, and it aims to hide "non-content" data, like the sender and receiver of messages, from passive eavesdroppers like those running warrantless wiretapping programs."

[https://bitmessage.org/wiki/Main_Page](https://bitmessage.org/wiki/Main_Page)

tldr: It's like encrypted IRC (without an IRC server).</comment>


How the government prints and distributes money [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cp8d-OeGl4o <comment><USER3> Never seen such crap on this site.

<comment><USER4> What's wrong with it?

<comment><USER3> Some dude ranting about "how the system works" where "you are all slaves" and "they get free money" does not help anyone but the youtuber who's collecting views.

<comment><USER4> But this is the reality and it does help people to know about this.

For the same amount of money, we don't all have to work as hard or produce the same amount of economic value, this is a true fact and it's ethically wrong. The economic reality of our situation affects every person on the planet so it affects everything. It's vitally important that we all understand how the system works even if explained in such hand-wavy way.

It's no coincidence that they don't teach this in schools. You'd think they would want people to know how money is created; after all, everyone spends their entire lives working for that money but we know nothing about it - <USER2> elites who control the banks don't want people do know because people would be able to see so many issues.

Isn't it strange that in school, we learn Maths, Physics, Chemistry, English, Geography, History... The arguments used for teaching those subjects is that they provide a good foundation of knowledge for all citizens... but when it comes to one of the most important subjects in our lives which affects every single citizen, we don't know anything about it. We all come out of school having a pretty good idea about how gravity works but we know almost nothing about how the financial system works (even though knowing about the latter can be used to our our advantage). It's no coincidence. If the majority of people knew, the current system would collapse and be replaced by something better.

<comment><USER5> Well, wealth allocation (through money and debt creation in our modern world) is a really complex topic. And it plays into various aspect of human knowledge and behaviors, from Maths and Physics to History, Sociology and Psychology.

It's a very difficult topic to grasp and is subject to various changes, from vested interest of groups (said group which itself could be composed of competing entities) to ideological decisions.

Crying wolf and having borderline conspiracy theories about "how the government is here to robe you!" and "how the elites are here to maintain ignorance!" doesn't help this discussion.

The real discussion is how wealth should be allocated: toward which goals? (consumption? investments? which kind of consumption or investments?) by who should it be allocated? (banks? selected individuals? governments?) What is the "correct" wealth distribution (high or low inequality, more or less towards investments or consumption etc).

If you frame the debate this way, you start to have more constructive criticisms of today situation and the current system (Which don't get me wrong, is definitely flawed and biased toward wealth concentration).

And I've seen videos on Youtube doing exactly that, contrary to the video linked there which is more about ranting, is poorly structured and doesn't give a clearer view of the situation.

<comment><USER6> > It's a very difficult topic to grasp and is subject to various changes, from > vested interest of groups (said group which itself could be composed of > competing entities) to ideological decisions.

This is so disingenuous and reeks of a superiority complex. "This system is too complex for poors to understand, that's why we, the educated and wealthy, are printing more money for ourselves. It will trickle down, we promise! We're really smart and know what we're doing!"

> Which don't get me wrong, is definitely flawed and biased toward wealth > concentration

Exactly right. It's not complicated because it needs to be, it's complicated to hide layers and layers of corruption where we have codified methods for handing more money to people who already have enough of it.

> you start to have more constructive criticisms of today situation

I disagree with this. The average American has _no avenue_ for "constructive criticism" of this system, because the average American has no access to the political system. The only way to combat this problem is to raise hell, and possible even to spill blood -- considering how soon our corporate overlords are willing to sacrifice us to preserve their quarterly earning reports.

<comment><USER5> > This is so disingenuous and reeks of a superiority complex

Well, no. I doubt anybody on Earth (including bankers, billionaires or governments) truly can grasp all the ins and outs of money/debts creation and all the consequence it has on the economy and society. At best they can have a local and short term view which are in their best interest.

For example, 1929 crisis, more than 90 years after the events is not a completely settled question among scholars up to this day (not so much on the origins but more on the effect of the responses of Hoover/Roosevelt distinct policies and the policies of other countries around the world at the time).

To make a really bad analogy, the current financial system is a bit like this big old legacy system with COBOL, some partial rewrite in Java, some ad-hoc hacks created when it crashed. It's a huge mess to entangle, not always logical, but it kind of works except when it doesn't. And nobody really knows fully how it works. The current financial system is a bit like that, except it's a 300/400 years old (~creation of the first central banks), has seen tons of crashes and hacks, and has laws, procedures, customs and policies as "source code" which makes it really hard to read.

<comment><USER6> > I doubt anybody on Earth (including bankers, billionaires or governments) > truly can grasp all the ins and outs of money/debts creation and all the > consequence it has on the economy and society.

Then the whole system needs to be thrown out and rewritten from scratch. It's pretty obvious who benefits from all the jargon, complexity, and abstractions. And it's not labourers, that's for sure.

<comment><USER4> I think that this is a very strong argument. The opacity of the system is in itself sufficient grounds to label it as unethical. It's not ethical to coerce someone into accepting the value of something that they are not capable of understanding and which constantly changes in ways that they also cannot understand.

If, without telling you, I took a gold coin from you and replaced it with a gold-painted led coin and then I gave your gold coin to someone else, this is stealing. The fact that you don't realize that there is a difference does not matter. How is this different from what the Fed is doing?

It's not right to assume that this economic system treats us all equally on the basis that everyone is equally incapable of understanding it.

People game the system by observing what works and reacting to familiar situations in ways to maximize their personal benefit. If the rules of the system don't change for a long time, the system becomes ossified and we end up with an inherently unjust system.

Goodhart's law states that "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" \- The measuring tools which the government has been using to operate our economy are already well understood and have being exploited for a long time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> most people still think that the government starts the printing press when they hear money printing...</comment>


Greenspun applies a book of sales advice to his business - <AUTHOR> http://philip.greenspun.com/book-reviews/yes <comment><USER2> _The Yelp project did not work out at all well. About 20 customers registered with Yelp and entered positive reviews, but then Yelp deleted nearly all of them. Folks have explained to us that Yelp only publishes positive reviews on the pages of companies who pay them to be listed (flight school owners are famously unwilling to part with money!)._

Data points accumulating.

<comment><USER3> The sentence preceding the excerpt you quoted is relevant. Phil wrote, "We did this recently by asking customers to go to Facebook and Yelp and write reviews of East Coast Aero Club." But Yelp frowns upon businesses that do that:

<http://www.yelp.com/business/common_questions>

Q. "Should I ask customers to write reviews for my business?"

A. "While we understand that there is a temptation to solicit reviews from your customers, it is not something we encourage. [...] If you do ask your customers for reviews, please be prepared for the review number fluctuation that might follow."

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I must admit, I was expecting this piece to be ironic (especially after describing the book as a "lame sequel"), or to have a punch line that they applied all of this and sales dropped 72%.

So I had to re-read it with a different mindset, and there's a few tips I can take away.

</comment><comment><USER5> Here's an outline/summary of the book:

 _Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive_

[http://bookoutlines.pbworks.com/Yes!?SearchFor=50+scientific...](http://bookoutlines.pbworks.com/Yes!?SearchFor=50+scientifically&sp=1)

 _Edit: fix link_

<comment><USER6> Link is broken.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> _I'm not sure how to rename a one-hour flight lesson_

Borrow Mark Pilgrim's "Dive into X" line. Well, perhaps using "jump" instead of "dive" ...</comment>


Tesla Steals Google's Jason Wheeler for CFO Role - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2015/11/03/tesla-steals-googles-jason-wheeler-for-cfo-role/ <comment><USER2> I object to this sort of phrasing when describing someone being hired. People aren't property, you can't "steal" a person (you can kidnap them sure). They made him a better offer than the one Google had for him, and he took it willingly. He wasn't stuffed in the back of a van at 3am by a crack team hired by Tesla. There was no theft.

<comment><AUTHOR> I wanted to edit that headline when I submitted this story, but I knew HN would revert it back to the original so I didn't bother.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Create your own Trump animation - 100-xyz https://toonclip.com/editor3?key1=5610c2d35a <comment> 100-xyz Sorry the correct link is. Not sure how to change the submission now.

[https://toonclip.com/fork?key1=5610c2d35a](https://toonclip.com/fork?key1=5610c2d35a)

</comment><comment> 100-xyz Not sure, if this is acceptable here. Mods if not, feel free to delete.</comment>


Seneca on The Shortness of Time (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://fs.blog/2017/03/seneca-on-the-shortness-of-time/ <comment><USER2> It was this essay, along with a choice quote from Epictetus, that induced me to finally leave my day job to go back to University to study CS. I graduated a month ago and began my first full-time SWE position last Monday.

I spent my twenties on auto-pilot, allowing external circumstances to effectively decide my life for me. Seneca and the Stoics reminded me of the immense agency I still possessed, despite the obscenity that was the recession and the cost of American Higher Education. I still had some say over my life, or at least over my choices, and if I didn't exercise my agency, life would slip through my fingers and hurtle to me a deathbed filled with regret and disappointment.

The quote from Epictetus:

"How long are you going to wait before you demand the best for yourself and in no instance bypass the discriminations of reason? You have been given the principles that you ought to endorse, and you have endorsed them. What kind of teacher, then, are you still waiting for in order to refer your self- improvement to him? You are no longer a boy but a full-grown man. If you are careless and lazy now and keep putting things off and always deferring the day after which you will attend to yourself, you will not notice that you are making no progress but you will live and die as someone quite ordinary. From now on, then, resolve to live as a grown-up who is making progress, and make whatever you think best a law that you never set aside. And whenever you encounter anything that is difficult or pleasurable or highly or lowly regarded, remember that the contest is now, you are at the Olympic games, you cannot wait any longer, and that your progress is wrecked or preserved by a single day and a single event. This is how Socrates fulfilled himself by attending to nothing except reason in everything he encountered. And you, although you are not yet Socrates, should live as someone who at least wants to be Socrates."

<comment><USER3> I found it shocking to realize that thousand years old realizations are still worth more than the vast majority of ideas invented since (regarding human existence that is).

Gives a slight taint to the meaning of the word 'progress'.

<comment><USER4> That's the thing about philosophy - it doesn't take any special tools or rely on modern technology to study, just intellect. People today aren't any more or less sophisticated than the people of thousands of years ago, and them no more than the people thousands of years before them. Philosophy transcends time and space, and the golden age of Greek and Roman philosophy is full of extremely insightful and applicable knowledge to our modern lives.

<comment><USER5> > People today aren't any more or less sophisticated than the people of > thousands of years ago, and them no more than the people thousands of years > before them.

Well, yes and no. We certainly _know_ a lot more than people knew back then. We know vastly more about the cosmos, we know about atoms, we know about evolution, we know much about the brain.

We also face very different challenges than people millennia ago - we have weapons of mass destruction, more obesity than famine (in developed countries), social media, and so on.

Thus, I'd say only a small part of philosophy is still applicable and valuable today. (For example, Seneca was a Stoic, and Stoicism had much to say about physics and logic, which is pretty obsolete now, I'd say.)

There's a potential fallacy there, like thinking that old music was better, when what we still hear today is just the very best of old music.

<comment><USER6> Funny how you mention the atoms, since the idea of atoms goes back to the ancient greeks, they coined the term. Obviously they had no way to prove it. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom#History_of_atomic_theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom#History_of_atomic_theory)

<comment><USER5> That's why I mentioned it - I cannot see in Democritus' theory anything but idle speculation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> On a related note, if you don't make conscious and deliberate decisions about how you want to spend your finite time -- i.e. if you are living "on autopilot" as another commenter said -- the decisions will be made for you by default, whether you like it or not.

"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet." ― Sylvia Plath

<comment><USER8> Wonderful quote! How do you get more figs in the tree? As in, how to discover possibilities you haven't thought of, and the tree has only 2-3 figs now, none amazing?

<comment><USER9> I think this could help.

1\. The point is not to "do what you love", but to "love what you do".

Trying to do what you love is destined to fail quickly: there's always something else, there's always a part of the job you don't like, and you never truly have control over the very fact that you love something or not, at least not if you approach it like that — you'd be condemned to follow your emotions as the only decision maker for your choices in life. But emotions are meant to guide us (it's information, just the language of the body), not control us.

Loving what you do, however, is a totally different process, and quickly becomes a choice as you flex that muscle: essentially it's about putting "good will" into all your actions, it's about this idea that "how you do anything is how you do everything"; to sincerely try with an open mind and being positive about it. Several things follow from this simple practice, mindset:

\- we are creatures of habit, and the more we do something, usually the more we like it. It's just how the brain is wired — that's how marketing works, by sheer repetition, law of numbers. Propaganda and manipulation as well. "Self- programming" yourself to be able, in time, to grow positive feelings about _anything_ you have to do is really a sort of superpower in this day and age.

\- Here's an equation: effort + love = mastery (alternatively, you may see grit + passion = skill, any variation like that). The message is clear: lots of effort (time, regularity, repetition) and lots of love (but that part comes from the doing, it's mechanical unless you resist it) is how we build ourselves, and happiness among other things follows from that (because nobody can take away such happiness from you, it's internal).

\- It seems that we all score differently on that scale, the term is conscientiousness, but it is my belief that it can be trained by force of will + action, i.e. determination (to commit to do it, whether you are "motivated" or not, regardless of emotions) + effort (marathon: paced, sustained, repetition, long-term).

It takes about 20 days to break a habit, and 3 months to form a new one. Probably about a year to make it last virtually forever, unless detrained.

These simple things have huge effects over the psyche (happiness notably) in the long run. Massive compound effects.

2\. Another thing is the idea of "meaning", purpose, the "why" we do what we do. As far as I'm concerned, this matter is solved: _you_ create meaning for yourself. That's it. We all make a patchwork from bits and pieces from all over the place, and it may appear of its own as a child or never for a lifetime, but ultimately, it's a conscious act, a decision you make. Meaning is the result of volition, internal drive to give substance to the world; those who seek it externally may be amazed at others but probably feel empty themselves until they become the creators of their own interpretation, their own meaning. Purpose is what you say it is.

The short TL;DR is that if you picked up anything and worked diligently at it for 10 years, you'd come out the other side an expert and loving it (average/normal human response to that situation).

<comment><USER10> _" the more we do something, usually the more we like it"_

That may be true for some, but for me the more I do something the less I like it.

I need a lot of variety or I get bored and burnt out on whatever it is I'm doing, no matter how much I used to like it when I first started.

In some cases an absence of years or even decades has not rekindled my interest in what I used to love but overdid.

Doing something over and over and over again eventually kills my passion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Yet the best hours of my life have been idle, empty ones with no plans or agenda whatsoever.

This whole idea of filling time with 'work' like it is a race is completely antithetical to any idea of joy and fulfilment.

It feels like 'wasting' time or downtime is essential to meaningful productivity.

I did absolutely nothing and it was everything that I thought it could be. -- Peter Gibbons.

<comment><USER12> Coasting through life is still being part of the rat race - except you run at a lower pace.

The core issue remains: if you don't have a plan for your life, society will make a plan for you.

By making your own destiny, you may fill part of your time with work, but only as long as it serves your purpose.

How good is your idea of wasting time to get meaningful productivity, if you are achieving someone else's goals instead of your own?

<comment><USER11> > How good is your idea of wasting time to get meaningful productivity, if you > are achieving someone else's goals instead of your own?

That's a great point actually - the someone else's goals part. The whole intelligence in service of madness thing stems from the fact that sane and intelligent people sometimes do not have a goal of their own.

I definitely did not mean to imply that idling is the only thing you do with your life - on the contrary I was trying to say idling is a great way of knowing who you are and coming up with general goals for yourself that you can then fulfill in the rest of the time.

The problem with busy life is you never really dream of your goals and are constantly looking for things to do - it makes it almost eventual that you'll be in service of others' goals. That's not always a bad thing but I find no fulfillment in doing just that.

<comment><USER13> _The whole intelligence in service of madness thing stems from the fact that sane and intelligent people sometimes do not have a goal of their own._

I have a suspicion that the majority only have a vague idea and they mostly end up where they are by happenstance.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Am I the only one who doesn't find this kind of writing helpful? It just seems to add to my increasing anxiety about throwing my life away by reminding me of that fact but not presenting a path to solution. I think I can best summarise my problem from the quote

> "A man who dares to waste an hour of time has not discovered the value of > his life."

The critical thing that I'm missing is how does one go about finding the value of their life exactly?

</comment><comment><USER15> Shameless plug, you can download a high quality ebook of his dialogues, including "On the Shortness of Life," for free at Standard Ebooks: [https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/seneca/dialogues/aubrey- st...](https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/seneca/dialogues/aubrey-stewart)

</comment><comment><USER10> Seneca's _Moral Letters_ [1] are also well worth reading, though they are as a whole more hit and miss than _On the Shortness of Life_ which is excellent throughout.

[1] - [https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius)

</comment><comment> 867-5309 "The very parent at the park playing on his iPhone while his children run around playing and laughing is the same one, who, when you fast-forward the axis of time, wants those precious moments back."

other brands are available..

<comment><USER16> Antonomasia?

<comment> 867-5309 product placement? elite luxury?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Letters by seneca (free)

[http://www.openculture.com/2017/10/three-huge-volumes-of- sto...](http://www.openculture.com/2017/10/three-huge-volumes-of-stoic- writings-by-seneca-now-free-online-thanks-to-tim-ferriss.html)

</comment><comment><USER18> I didn't realize Seneca was still writing as of 2017

<comment><USER19> We'd change the year to that of his letter, but the bulk of the OP was not written by Seneca.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> If you like to read more about Seneca, I can't recommend enough Tao Of Seneca [1] by Tim Ferris. Other classical text that are must read include Enchiridion by Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius Meditations

[1] [https://tim.blog/2017/07/06/tao-of- seneca/](https://tim.blog/2017/07/06/tao-of-seneca/)

</comment><comment><USER21> One thing I can't shake, and it appears already in the second sentence of the quoted letters by Seneca:

"Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested."

What are "great things" and what is the definition of a "well-invested life"? Most of us will live rather unremarkable lives, most likely forgotten in a hundred years or so (at best!). Who says a "good life" means being remembered as long as possible by future humans? Who says the point of living is not to live in luxury and carelessness?

It just seems to me that Seneca assumes the stoic world-view to be the norm. Can anyone help me understand?

<comment><USER22> It's yours to define. If you consider it properly, and conclude that you would choose your life to be luxury and carelessness, then it makes sense to start steering things in that direction for yourself.

Some folks find satisfaction in raising then next generation. Others want a statue of themselves somewhere that lasts for a few hundred years beyond their own life. Some folks create, others are satisfied with minimal impact.

It's all personal, but considering it and then acting on it is the core idea. Otherwise time carries on regardless and you get to the end to look back over a pointless meandering. Which, if you consider that to be ok, is also fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> > The best way to spend money is to buy time

I realized recently that I never fully understood 'time is money', never felt it first-hand truly and deeply, until I tried to start my own business. Then I 'discovered' that money directly extended the amount of time I could chase my dream and feed my family. Having a job never gave me the sense that I was buying time, maybe because it's not finite in the same way the startup is.

</comment><comment><USER3> I was reminded that some things in adult life still distort the notion of time. Climbing for instance got people to quote "turns a second in a century". The amount of focus and depth for every little move makes your mind works differently.

I think modern life kills this. Too many things are too comfortable and too stressful (as in short burst of opposite stimuli).

</comment><comment><USER24> _So it is—the life we receive is not short, but we make it so, nor do we have any lack of it, but are wasteful of it._</comment>


How to charge for websites? - <AUTHOR> http://www.sitepoint.com/charge-websites-fixed-price-projects/ <comment> at-fates-hands I've seen and used just about every approach to this, yet the author completely skips the most lucrative approach, the subscription based model.

I've used this on larger clients and have had great success with it. It gives them a sense of comfort since they're paying me monthly to keep their content fresh and SEO up-to-date and still have the opportunity for a redesign after a year. Plus, it gives me a nice chunk or recurring monthly revenue and establishes a long-term relationship.

<comment><USER2> How does this model usually work with web design? Is it simply that the client subscribes to n hours per month for updates, hosting isssues, etc? Then if the client wants substantial work done, they can temporarily contract for more hours?

<comment> at-fates-hands Usually what happens as part of the subscription, they pay for each individual part of the work. So design is one part, development is another. Content is another and SEO is another. Newsletter articles, responsiveness, and other features are all individually priced.

In the end, they might have 6-10K worth of services they want, so you just put them on "subscription" and let them pay monthly. At the one year mark, you can let them redesign and update the content and seo, which usually involves more development, more content writing, etc. You basically bill them again with say a 10-15% discount and then you're good for another year. You can also offer additional services at a discounted monthly rate as well like writing blog posts or articles that are added to their site on a schedule so it helps with SERPS and content weight of their site.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm not sure how seriously I should take this advice when the authors website looks like this:

[http://www.optimalworks.net/](http://www.optimalworks.net/)

<comment><USER4> I typically hate on websites pretty hard, but actually I don't have much problem with that site. Maybe it's a bit orange, but it's clear and usable. What are your objections to it?

<comment><USER5> * No visual heirarchy since everything is incredibly saturated

* Useless stock icons are _way_ bigger than the text describing them

* Horrible use of white space

* Weird margins and padding

* Constantly moving animation at the top right

* Tacky quotes like "We will not rest until you have a site to be proud of."

* Only 2 clients ever (and only one of them even has a screenshot)

* Their RSS feed names their blog "BLOGNAME".

I'm not attacking the site, just listing the things that jumped out at me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like to charge a flat rate for the first X number of hours, then charge $Y/hour after that. This forces me to gather the requirement before making an estimate. It discourages the customer from adding new requirement unless it is worth $Y/hour to them.

</comment><comment><USER7> Here's a question: why does the model website-as-a-service works for blogs, but not for other kinds of websites?

You see, wordpress.com charges for blogs, ghost.io charges for blogs, other people give blogs for free, but still benefit from it somehow, also there's the example of portfolio WaaS like 4ormat.com, but this model only applies to these cases, never to hospital sites, restaurant sites, hotel sites, book sites, or any other kind of website.

Then people in need of these other kinds of website always fell into building a blog, even paying for other people to build them a self-hosted pretty awful solution Wordpress blog. has this been tried?

<comment><USER8> Off the top of my head, they already exist for music/dance studios and real estate. You just don't come across them because you aren't looking.

<comment><USER7> Can you point me to them?

<comment><USER8> [http://www.mainstreetsites.com/](http://www.mainstreetsites.com/) [http://yourvirtuoso.com/](http://yourvirtuoso.com/)

I've also seen some for real estate and others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My small experience with charging is related specifically to the client size.

If you want to charge $350/hour, weekly and on a long basis, odds are you'll be charging a corporation and not a household.

My experience also, you probably won't get $350/hour even if you charge the client so. There will be middle man, taxes, vat, payment delays, accounting and many other expenses...

That's why you should be charging at least $200/hour. And that's for the very mundane, and noncompetitive tasks.

<comment><USER10> Note that this really depends where you are from. In my part of Canada, you would be charging around $90 to $120 / hour.

<comment><USER9> I'm doing remote work. Currently in an underdeveloped country.

<comment><USER11> I'm doing remote work in a major US city. I've been charging well above market rates for a while now, but haven't been able to break the $100 / hour barrier yet.

I feel like my income is stagnating -- my skills and expertise are at the top of their game, but I just haven't been able to find projects where I'm able to charge more.

Where should I be looking? Is there an effective way for me to change my approach?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is sensible, but can't he find someone to compare us computer folks to besides used car dealers? That's not painting a happy picture in many people's minds.

<comment><USER13> Agreed. The analogy also breaks down quickly because there is no car dealer that sells both a 10-year old Ford and F1 McLaren. Generally, dealerships offer very narrow bands of value within that large range.

<comment><USER14> Don't be a used-car web dev then. Be the luxury sedan - sport car web dev. I explain to my clients (not necessarily through this analogy) that I'm definitely not the cheapest dev/designer they'll be able to find, but that they'll gain more quality, etc. for more money with me (with case studies to back that claim up). I don't sell my clients used cars, and so they don't expect to pay used-car rates with me ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Why does this site eat 50% of my CPU?

<comment><USER14> Close down those porn tabs you have open? idk. lol</comment></comment>


Multi-dimensional voting, a better defense against trolling? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> I was fooled by a troll yesterday. (Then people started docking ME points! Oh, the injustice! ;) )

Anyways, the simple up/down voting seems to reward trolls with lot's of attention (negative points) and prime real-estate (bottom of the page). Instead, why not add a "fader" where a couple of "fades" will turn trolly comments grey then white...

No social news sites I can think of are playing around with multi-dimensional voting of any sort...is there some good reason why not?

<comment><USER2> Would you consider Slashdot to have "multi-dimensional" voting, given their Interesting, Insightful, Informative, Funny, and (of course) Troll ratings?

It seems to have worked well enough there.

<comment><AUTHOR> I haven't looked much at Slashdot lately, but they have certainly put a lot of work into designing a good system for moderating comments. You are right that they have some dimensionality, and a way to "fade" trolls by adjusting your settings so you only see highly rated comments.

Still, for me at least, I don't find their dimensionality very helpful. "funny" and "informative" are rather broad categories. If all the content on Slashdot could be simultaneously ranked on a scale of "value to startup entrepeneurs looking for seed funding" and "online video content"...that would be useful to me!

I don't have any particular ideas about what should be done, but limiting your choices to "up" and "down" seems so narrow. Maybe I should jsut be happy it works as well as it does!</comment></comment></comment>


Nexus 7 cover now available - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/devices/details?id=nexus_7_cover

<comment> yo-mf Wow, that is as ugly as sin...</comment>